Goals update

 

Five weeks ago I posted about my goals.

I have two ‘long term goals’ right now

1) To get my body fat into the ‘ideal’ range – for me that means under 25%

2) To complete the London Marathon 2014 in under 5 hours

As both those goals are quite a long way off I’d set myself some smaller ones for a five week period – something closer to hand that I could focus on day to day. I find this approach works really well for me. Those five weeks are now up so I thought I’d update you on how I got on.

Goal 1

To get my body fat to under 30% – achieved! My last body fat reading was 29.8%. At the start of the year my body fat was at over 40% so I’m absolutely delighted with this progress.

Goal 2

To lift 50kg for a bent over row – achieved! Last week I lifted 50.5kg for 3 x 5 reps

Goal 3

To chest press 2 x 15kg – achieved – same as the bent over row – 3 x 5 reps done!

Goal 4

To be able to do a pull up. Hmm. This one hasn’t gone quite so well. Pull ups are hard and I must admit that because I find them difficult I’ve got a bit frustrated with my lack of progress and maybe not practiced as much as I need to. I’ll carry this goal over into my next set and I WILL get there!

You’ll notice that I hadn’t set myself any running related goals. Which was just as well as it turned out as I’ve spent the last five weeks dealing with a number of annoying niggles and injuries. What started out as ITB issues seemed to move into my knee and my physio thinks that I’d created micro tears or strains in a number of the fibres and tendons around my knee. It wasn’t painful, it was just uncomfortable but I needed to rest it to let it heal. Running was out of the question as was anything high impact.

Thankfully things seem to be pretty much healed now and I risked running the National Lottery Anniversary Run last weekend – I couldn’t miss the opportunity to run in the Olympic stadium. I don’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from the race and with some races coming up in September and October it’s time to re-focus on my running.

So I’m setting some more goals for the next 7 weeks and they are as follows:

1) To get my body fat % below 27%

2) To set a new 10K PB in the Women’s Running 10K on September 7th. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I’d like to get around in under 65mins. That would be 7 minutes off my official PB of 72 minutes.

3) To do a pull up. These will not defeat me – I WILL get there!

As the saying goes “a goal without a plan is just a wish”, so how am I going to achieve these?

I’m going to keep to my current training regime of heavy lifting and high intensity interval sessions supplemented by reformer Pilates sessions at Tempo Pilates and yoga classes at Good Vibes Studios. I’m going to maintain my mostly healthy most of the time approach to clean eating and continue with my Intermittent Fasting regime. I’ll add in some running – I comfortably covered 5 miles last weekend having not run at all for 6 weeks previously so I’m feeling confident in that respect.

And finally I will practice, practice, practice my pull ups!